Edit: My beau-frère Piers made a Rdio playlist of (almost all of) the songs below. If you don’t mind signing up for things, you can listen to it here!

This is the year I became a dad, voted for Jill Stein, learned to drive, fell in love with Wall of Sound Records, rode my bike crosswise across the city three days a week for work, discovered old-timers like Lefty Frizzell, Carroll Thompson, Coleman Hawkins, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, the Soul Stirrers, and the Clean, and listened to new music ardently, locally, and indulgently. Here’s my musical story, A to Z, January to December.

Albums: Sweat through your cardigan

Jherek Bischoff, Composed. The jam of our house’s cloudy June. Grand and unfussy and moving. Full of great singers singing words secondary to their timbres against the timbres of violin and rolling drum.

Mark Eitzel, Don’t Be a Stranger. I sometimes forget about singer-songwriter music! His close-mic’d, cracked voice against the gentle production is bliss, throwing into relief lyrics like “I did not mean to scare your sad little brat” and “I control my arms and my legs and my hands and my hair and my face, like I’m holding a gun in a video game.”

Mount Eerie, Clear Moon/Ocean Roar.

Nas, Life Is Good. Lots of smart people have called “Accident Murderers,” “NASTY,” and “The Don” returns to form and I agree; still, I replay it most often not for the singles but for the deliberate throwback Eric B/New Jack ease of the album tracks. Plenty of MCs have sounded great on this kind of spry, jazzy stuff, but Guru couldn’t rap like this; hell, even Rakim couldn’t rap like this.

Swans, The Seer. Odin’s housecleaning music. At first listen I resisted the macho gigantism– the moments I like least feel like the charge on Helm’s Deep— but I’m now crazy about the ambition, the thunder-and-light-speed. Plus Karen O’s Gira impression.

THEESatisfaction, awE naturalE. Some critics hated on this record because they couldn’t understand why two poets would make a groove album instead of a voice album. But those critics are idiots!

Voices from the Lake, Voices from the Lake. A pure midnight half-submerged live humid stir and hum. Wish it never ended. My spell of the year.

Your Heart Breaks, Harsh Tokes and Bong Jokes. Songs fans have heard Clyde play for years given a show-up-tune-up-and-roll-tape recording.

Earth, “A Multiplicity of Doors“: Saw the release show for this record two weeks before Finn was born; Jupiter and Venus came out together every night, our camellia bloomed, and everything seemed to lean enormously toward life.

Fabulous Diamonds, “Lothario“: Spent a dollar on this song for its circling-the-sun-drain sort of vitality and endlessness.

Lower Dens, “Propagation.” Swans and Jana Hunter probably get their organic produce at the same haunted-forest farmer’s market.

Mount Eerie, “House Shape” and “Pale Lights.” Flattened by the latter sitting on the dirty church floor at Unknown, two chords that seemed like they’d never stop, through an actual smoke machine and a storm sunset blood-purple and bubbling out the high windows! The center songs of their respective records.

With a shoutout to all the presumably great records I didn’t get a chance to listen to this year because I’m too busy or because my baby hated them or because everyone who uses the library got to them ahead of me or because I was too broke to buy them: Converge’s All We Love…, Sun Araw’s collaboration with the Congos, Bat For Lashes’ Haunted Man and Corin Tucker’s Kill My Blues. See you in 2013!